


Before Us Lies Eternity

by Gammarad



Category: Archer's Goon - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: F/M, IN SPACE!, Pregnancy, Suicidal or Homicidal Thoughts, Thought Projection, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-07 00:10:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20300227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/pseuds/Gammarad
Summary: Venturus had sent his three eldest siblings into space with three human beings.What might have happened to Archer, Fifi, Dillian, Shine, and the two henchmen of Shine's aboard the Venturus's maiden voyage?





	Before Us Lies Eternity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_rck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/gifts).
  * Inspired by [How Old My Heart](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2796023) by [the_rck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/pseuds/the_rck). 

> Title taken from "Ephemera" by William Butler Yeats

There were days and days to fill doing almost nothing out in space. Fifi hadn't expected the _boredom._ Traveling on a spaceship should be exciting, scary, filled with mysterious aliens and dangerous asteroid fields and occasionally a nebula that was both mysterious _and_ dangerous.

Mostly there was nothing at all. The science fiction television shows of her youth had misled her tremendously. There was only the constant sulking of Shine, the easy-to-ignore conversation attempts from Shine's two young men, the overly friendly overtures of Dillian, and the occasional bursts of interest from Archer when he wasn't preoccupied trying to reprogram the spaceship to take them back to Earth. 

She didn't mind Dillian, not really. Not when there was always Shine to compare her with and see how much room there was for Dillian to be worse. It was having to always be on her guard that was exhausting. She couldn't talk long with Samir or William. That would set Shine off easier than anything else.

That day there had been some sort of rock that came within a few thousand miles of the ship, which was more than had happened the day before. Archer had almost managed to use the latest grappler technology he wanted to test to pull it closer. He had, though, got detailed scans of it and was neck deep in readouts trying to figure out if it had come from somewhere with life and if they could figure out where that was so they could visit.

Dillian was sure he would do it. "Fifi, dear," she said, "When we reach the planet, we must find some plants that will grow on the ship. Won't it be lovely to have potted plants aboard? Especially flowers. I do miss flowers so much, don't you?"

Fifi did, actually, miss flowers. But she wasn't about to give Dillian the satisfaction of agreeing with her. It would only encourage her and she felt both guilty and afraid in equal measure of encouraging Dillian. It was too bad Miss Potter hadn't been able to be brought along. If only. Miss Potter would have been very happy to distract Dillian from her attempts to charm Fifi. Shine's young men were not much help with that.

"Flowers are beautiful, but they make me sneeze," Fifi said. She wondered if it was too soon to go down to the lower deck and watch Archer look at the scans. He always seemed so intense and sincere when he was deep in thought. And he usually didn't notice her staring at those times. If he did notice, sometimes he was even pleased. Those were her favorite. And if he wasn't pleased, well. There was nowhere he could go. 

She could make coffee for him. He often wanted some around this time. There weren't really days in space, of course, but the ship had a clock and they pretended. It was early afternoon and teatime and that was the time Archer most often wanted coffee and a snack. 

"Flowers not from Earth would have little chance of making you sneeze," Dillian had said, and continued on to explain how she would set up growth conditions for these imaginary alien plants. Fifi interrupted to excuse herself, politely offering to make some tea for Dillian while she was in the galley. Dillian could be unbearable if Fifi wasn't polite to her. She lectured about manners in close quarters. She never did that with Shine.

It wouldn't have helped. They were fortunate Shine slept more hours than a cat. Fifi wondered how she had so often been annoyed by Awful. It was because she hadn't ever had to live with Shine. Fifi tried to be ready to take a nap whenever Shine woke up for a few hours. It was safer to let Dillian and Archer and her two young men handle her. Fifi had no defense.

Other than that Archer and Dillian didn't want Fifi dead, she supposed. Or seriously injured. Or in any way disabled. They didn't have any way to exactly prevent this, but Shine knew they would gang up on her and was maybe afraid of it. She always stopped before it would come to anything like that. 

Though that wasn't really a help, either. Fifi wasn't sure Shine would bother to want to torment her if it wasn't her only way to really get to her brother and sister. She couldn't do anything to them directly. Shine didn't admit that was the reason, but it had to be. 

The coffee was ready. She put it in a cup with a cover in case of the artificial gravity changing direction -- it didn't do that often, but it was still a smart precaution -- and took it down to Archer. On the way she approached where Shine was asleep and could hear the snores through the closed sliding door. She walked by on tiptoe.

Archer had half-reassembled the panel of controls. Kneeling in front of them, he glanced from a handheld display to the tangle of circuitry and twisted a blue wire with a red one, connecting them as if they'd never been separate. What he did wasn't always possible, at least the way Fifi understood possibility. He had limitations. They'd already be back on Earth if he didn't. Fifi just didn't quite know what his limitations were, or why they were.

"Coffee?" she asked brightly. 

"_Thank_ you," Archer said. He gave her a sidelong grin. She put her hand on his shoulder as she handed him the coffee, only partly to keep her balance as she bent her knees. He took a sip. "Mmmm, it's good."

She sank down next to him. "What's this going to do?"

"I'm realigning the shielding so we can go faster without throwing off the artificial gravity or exposing you to too much radiation. It's going to make it easier to get us somewhere interesting -- I still can't get the guidance fully under control, but I'm hoping we'll have leeway to go into orbit if we find a suitable planet in the cone we're able to visit." 

"A cone?" Fifi knew how to ask leading questions to keep him talking. 

"Think of it like a funnel where the small end is attached to Earth and we're flowing up the sides instead of down. We can go anywhere on the cone as long as it's away from Earth and within a fixed angle respective to the anchor point. The boundary's a bigger circle the further we get from the origin."

She leaned against him, half listening. None of what he was saying was important, but she enjoyed the sound of his voice. 

"You'd better go back up to the bridge. I can't concentrate with you doing that." Archer kissed the top of Fifi's head. "You're the best distraction, but I need to work."

"Dillian wants to find a planet that has flowers," Fifi said, not sure if she meant it as a warning or a complaint. "She misses her potted plants."

"She's bored. There's nothing useful for her to do," Archer said, excusing Dillian as he usually did. He never noticed how tricky she was. Even now he refused to see it. "I'm sure she'd sleep all the time like Shine does if she could." 

"Maybe there's another thing she can help you with?" There had been a few times Archer got Dillian to help with his attempts to make the spaceship over to serve them better. Those were always the easiest times for Fifi, when they were busy with a project. When Dillian wasn't bored. When she had all the busywork to herself because Dillian was not doing it to keep herself occupied and Dillian wasn't trying to flirt with Fifi or get her to be friends or whatever she was always attempting. 

"She would only get in the way." This was what Fifi had expected his answer would be, but she was still disappointed. "Like you are. I'll be up in a little while." 

She reluctantly headed back up. But Shine was awake in her room this time, and must have heard Fifi walking by, because she started to mess with her thoughts. 

First there were images of Fifi sitting on Shine as she slept, strangling her. They were certainly attractive. Fifi would love to be rid of Shine for good, if it would actually work, which she was far from convinced of. Then tossing Dillian out an airlock. Also seemed like it would be good, maybe less so if Shine weren't already gone though, and the ship didn't even actually have an airlock like the one in the fantasy Shine was putting into her head. 

The next few were less appealing, though while she imagined them she wanted them just as much. Her putting poison in the food and eating it, feeling herself dying. Putting sleeping pills in the food and letting the others eat it, then killing them all while they slept. There weren't any sleeping pills on the ship either. Shine wanted her to think about murder all the time, or suicide. Fifi made it past the door and the thoughts faded, but they might come back if Shine decided to get out of bed and come up. She hoped she wouldn't.

She was so bad at hiding her feelings that even Dillian noticed, a lot of the time, when she was upset. Dillian liked it as an excuse to put her arm around Fifi and pat her cheek. Fifi tolerated it for the sake of her own mind and stomach. Dillian rebuffed was likely to cook their next meal with a special ingredient in it. 

Soon maybe they'd find a planet and go into orbit. Maybe it would have people. Maybe Archer would figure out a solution. Before Dillian put something in the food that made Fifi extra easy to persuade and Shine put ideas in her head and she did something they'd all regret. 

Maybe she'd find out then if they died when you killed them. 

She was sure she'd die if they killed her.

At least then it'd all be over.

\------

They'd found a planet. Archer's updates had finally got them somewhere. He'd got the ship into orbit and scanned the planet and landed on it. 

Dillian was overjoyed. The planet had a lot of plants and a profusion of flowers. They couldn't be eaten, but Archer was building a machine that would change them into food. They had the right things in them to be food, carbon and so on, he had explained; they just needed to have the amino acid chains built and the toxins filtered and … Fifi had got lost in the details somewhere between the protein synthesis and the heavy metal chelation. 

It was all to the good, because the food stores in the ship were finally getting close to running out. Shine didn't eat much for her size, but Sam and Liam ate a lot for theirs. Fifi was eating more than she used to now. At some point in the process of celebrating finding the planet, she and Archer had ignored any precautions and she was well on the way to producing the first baby born on this world. 

It was a scary thought. Scary all by itself with no help from Shine. 

Fifi felt good about the baby, though, most of the time. Since Archer had told his sisters about it, they'd been much more careful of her. Shine mostly gave her thoughts about what a good aunt Shine would be; these were not welcome, exactly, but they were infinitely easier to deal with than homicide fantasies. Dillian still courted her, but there was a different tone to how she courted a mother-to-be. More respect, even deference, less immediate assumption of the upper hand. Fifi thought Dillian wasn't even conscious of the change. She carefully didn't mention it.

The scary part of the baby was having to give birth without anyone experienced or who could do any kind of medical treatment. She hoped that Archer's ability to fix things would work on people, too, but she'd never had a chance to see if it did or not. 

\-----

When their son was three and their daughter was two, Archer began to have concerns about raising them around his sisters. Fifi had had these all along, but there hadn't been anything she could think of to do about them, so she had tried to put them out of her mind.

Archer did not. As usual, he set about to build a solution to the problem. 

It took him nearly a year, but he created a portal to an earlier time. About thirty years earlier, he told Fifi. He had made a portable version of the foodmaker and Fifi had gathered seeds from the edible plants Dillian had bred from the native ones. Archer's plan was to take them through the portal so that their children could grow up without influence from Shine and Dillian until they were adults.

Fifi might have been concerned about their influence even on adults, but by then she knew her children, and they were very strong willed. Like Awful and her parents, they had some of the mental stamina of their gifted father. There wasn't much she could do to protect herself, but she felt happy knowing her children would have the ability to.

And it would be very good to finally have a break from Shine and Dillian. Thirty years sounded like almost enough of a vacation from them.

\----

When Fifi was starting to feel the aches of age, Archer asked her if she wanted to be younger again. 

Their children were mostly grown, all four of them. Fifi wished they could somehow get back to Earth so they wouldn't be the only people in the world. Though she knew soon enough Dillian and Shine would arrive, along with the younger Fifi and Archer. 

"It's not possible for me to be younger again," Fifi said apologetically. Archer barely looked older than when she'd met him. She was going gray and had wrinkles around her eyes. 

"It is if you go into the future for a while," Archer said. "I've built another portal."

"Let me think about it," Fifi told him.

She thought about it for a long time. A whole growing season, from planting to harvest. Her back and neck ached terribly after the hard work of picking and storing their fields' worth of food. 

She told Archer she wanted to try going into the future and coming back younger.

The portal he'd built was a long walk away. He hadn't wanted anyone stumbling across it accidentally. They walked miles and miles and Fifi wondered if they'd got lost. Her knees ached from the walking and her back still hurt from the harvest. She wasn't sure if she should believe her eyes when they crested a tall hill and she saw the buildings down in the valley below. They looked tiny from here, like doll houses. Their children had played with doll houses for years. There was still one in a shed back home, put away for future children if there ever were to be any. Since she was going to be young again, Fifi thought, there might be.

"Did you build all this?" she asked Archer in surprise, pointing down at the structures.

He shook his head.

"So… there's aliens?" Fifi wasn't sure what to think.

"No, not that either." He looked away from her. 

What did he not want to tell her? She saw people now, at a distance, walking between the buildings. A lot of them. 

"More people found this planet? Your -- the people you come from?"

Archer glanced at her, then looked away again. "I suppose you have to know. I didn't remember you could see them from here. I've kept them away…." his voice trailed off.

"You didn't want me to know." Fifi frowned.

"You won't like it." Now Archer looked right at her, staring, not even blinking. It was a little unnerving, even now. She was afraid he might start sparking, but he didn't. "They're our descendants. Yours, mine, Shine and her boys and Dillian's even. Many times great-grandchildren. Some time eighty or a hundred years from now, I'm going to make a portal and send them way back, I think. They didn't keep records to know exactly. I'll send about twenty and there's probably twenty thousand now."

"You…" Fifi felt faint. She had how many great great grandchildren? It seemed impossible. 

"I didn't do anything to them we didn't do ourselves first," Archer said. He was making excuses. "We needed more people. There was nothing here! Nothing to farm. This way--"

"You aren't going to _farm_ your own grandchildren," Fifi said. Now she knew why he expected her to object.

"It's what they're for," he said, but she could tell he was not really set on it. 

She would win him over soon enough. Shine and Dillian would be the more difficult job when it came to that.

But twenty thousand people all descended from Archer, Shine and Dillian? Those people were not going to be anywhere near as easy to farm as her husband seemed to think. 

Fifi was ready to test being young again in a completely new world. She stepped through the portal to the future with an optimism that she hadn't felt since they left Earth.


End file.
